Nicole Sharp

There comes a stage in (nearly) every homebrew where you need to rapidly cool the wort. You can place an ice bath around your pot, or coil a (sterile) copper pipe of cold water through the mix, but the fastest method is to use a counterflow heat exchanger. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34234

Photographer Tony Wu captured the dance of a spawning sea star in this image. The surrounding water grew cloudy with sperm and eggs as the sea stars around him rose and swayed. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33373

Don't we all, really?

While standing along the Rio Grande, I was able to record a liquefaction demo! By simply tapping the sand, it progressively became more liquid-like. Liquefaction occurs when loose, water-saturated sand/soil loses its strength/stiffness during vibrations, causing it to behave like a liquid.

In quantum fluids, vorticity is quantized into discrete vortices only a few nanometers wide. For decades, researchers have tried to understand how turbulence dissipates among such vortices. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34047

I got my first AI-written email full of vacuous praise recycled from the cover of my not-yet-printed book this morning. So it begins. #authorlife

Jeju Island, some 100 kilometers to the south of the Korean Peninsula, rises nearly 2,000 meters above the sea. That height allows it to pierce the atmosphere and force air around--rather than over--its peak. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=30412

When spiders make a web, they draw out a liquid that--through cooling, chemical reactions, evaporation, or other processes--rapidly changes to a solid fiber. Spinning is the generic term for this process of rapidly forming a solid fiber from a liquid. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34171

During a September nor'easter, Jordan Pond in Acadia National Park enjoyed little worse than a breezy day. But those sustained winds drew foamy bubbles together into white lines running roughly perpendicular to the pond's waves. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34166

Ocean photographer Ben Thouard captured this image of a giant breaking wave in French Polynesia from a jet ski using a long telephoto lens. Wind rips spray from the top of the wave, giving it a veil in the sunlight. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=32908

As offshore wind farms grow more popular, there's greater opportunities for neighboring wind farms to affect one another. One way this happens is through their wakes, where slower, less energetic winds stretch up to 70 kilometers downstream. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33972

Humans and beavers both have a long history of engineering their environment by altering the flow of waterways. As Grady explains in this Practical Engineering video, our design philosophies even overlap to a degree! https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34095

The so-called Feynman sprinkler problem has long vexed physicists. If you reverse a standard sprinkler with S-shaped arms by sucking water into it, will it turn and, if so, in what direction? #fluiddynamics https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34098

Liquid droplets are often broken into smaller droplets using a jet of air flowing across the drop. Here, researchers have changed the situation by substituting an oil droplet in a water crossflow. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=30115

Photographer Nicolás Muñoz García enticed a curious black-browed albatross to chase his camera underwater in today's award-winning video. As the albatross swims closer, its face appears above the water, showing a fish's eye view of refraction. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33982

The Voyager flybys in the early 1980s revealed a mysterious hexagon at Saturn's northern pole. For decades, researchers searched for a similar polygon at the southern pole, with no luck. But that appears to be changing. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33862

Corals, like us, need oxygen. During the daytime, their symbiotic algae provide plenty, but at night, corals have to collect their own. They do this by stirring up the surrounding water with their microscopic cilia. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34035

Do you love learning about marmosets and tamarins in the Amazon rainforest, but not love Amazon dot com? Anti-Prime Day at @bookshop.org is a great day to buy my book! bookshop.org/p/books/the-... 🧪

Lightweight particles can float atop a pool of water. With densely-packed particles, a raft forms. Here, researchers explore what happens to such a raft when the water vibrates vertically, inducing Faraday waves. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33988

When it comes to understanding planetary systems, it's often critical to capture more than one physical effect. Here, the UCLASpinLab demonstrates how a combination of rotation and salinity affect ice melting. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=34059

Fun fact: Michelle is one of the scientists featured in my forthcoming book. And, yes, it's for a chapter on microplastic pollution.

Flushing a toilet produces a cloud of tiny, inhaleable aerosol droplets, as we've seen before. When the flush includes pathogens, those droplets can become seeds for infection. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33966

Lenticular clouds are otherworldly on the own, but this image from photographer Francisco Negroni elevates the surrealism to another level. Here, a double lenticular cloud sits over the summit of the Villarrica volcano in Chile, illuminated at nightfall by the gl https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33427

Assistant Prof Monica Martinez Wilhelmus and Senior Research Associate Nils Tack, along with researchers from @casewestern.bsky.social, are winners of the Francois Frenkiel Award for Fluids Mechanics, conferred by the @apsdfd.bsky.social. Read more: engineering.brown.edu/news/2026-09...

On Arctic hillsides, solifluction creates terrace-like waves patterns, like those pictured above. Although these look similar to roll waves or lava flows, a new study shows that they're not physical equivalents. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=32204

Turns out part of the fallout from last week's attack on FYFD was that scheduled posts failed to go out. Thanks to @katherine-adler.bsky.social for bringing my attention to the problem! Lots of new material up now: fyfluiddynamics.com

At first glance, the dune field of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil looks like a desert. But this area's rainfall tops 50 inches a year, exceeding Seattle's typical amount. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33887

The Good Place should be much higher than this. Hardly any show hits such a consistently high level every single episode.

Spores rise like smoke from botanical boules in this image by photographer Emmy Young. To reproduce, many plants and fungi release spores to soar on the wind--or, in the case of the nearly-still air of the forest floor, drift subtly on a mushroom-made breeze. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=28983

Saturn's moon Enceladus, like several bodies in our solar system, has a global ocean beneath an icy shell. Unlike most other bodies, though, Enceladus has four large fissures--2 kilometers across and 130 kilometers long--that release geysers into space. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33316

During floods, dams often need to release excess water to prevent damage to their infrastructure. Spillways are one mechanism for this. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=30849

Blow across a glass bottle at the right flow speed, and you'll excite Helmholtz resonance in the bottle's neck. Today's study takes that effect, shrinks it down, and turns it into a method for controlling microrobots. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33840

Wildfires can generate their own thunderstorms through pyrocumulonimbus clouds. These clouds can have an outsized impact on the stratosphere, too, injecting smoke and particulates that can linger for years to come. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33880

A seal looks across a rain-pocked ocean surface in this photograph by Luca Lorenz. Over the summer, I found myself in a similar state to this seal, swimming in a lake as rain began to fall. It turned into one of the most peaceful moments of recent memory. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=33368

The tobacco hawkmoth, Manduca sexta, relies on its antennae to sense odors, but a new study shows they may have some ability to smell with their wings also. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=32467

The Nivlisen Ice Shelf is a floating tongue of glacial ice flowing off Antarctica. During summer months, dots and streaks of brilliant blue meltwater appear on its surface. More water lies beneath, in crevasses and other drainage channels below the ice surface. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=31702

When New Horizons passed Pluto in 2015, the dwarf planet was wrapped in a thin, hazy atmosphere of nitrogen. What happens to that atmosphere as the planet travels to the farthest reaches of its orbit is unknown, but we may be starting to find out. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=32472

We typically think of a chunk of metal as being solid and unchanging. Maybe you get a little oxidation on the outside surface, but everything stays the same inside, right? As Steve Mould explains in today's video, in some applications, the situation isn't that si https://fyfluiddynamics.com/?p=32062